MERIGOLD - A group of students at Hayes Cooper Center for Math, Science and Technology once learned how to put their education and more than a ton of leftovers to their immediate advantage.
For a class project, they weighed the food their classmates left on lunch trays, keeping tabs on which foods were thrown away most often. While only the class got a grade for the exercise, all 350 or so students and a few picky eaters on the faculty shared the reward.
"As a result, our cafeteria stopped serving those big English peas because nobody ate them," said Patsy Reese, director of Project PASS, the Cleveland School District's gifted program at Hayes Cooper.
The cause and effect of education are never far apart at the combination charter-magnet-whole school. Many of the lessons are paired with a field trip or an artistic venture or hands-on module to underscore their place in the real world.
Last year, as a fourth-grader, Devante Martin went to the Earth Lab in Canton with the rest of his class.
"We saw owls, and we saw where the Big Dipper and the Little Dipper were, and we saw planets through a big telescope," said Devante, 10. "It was like Boy Scouts, but you learn more."
The entire third grade goes to Callaway Gardens in Georgia, a trip 8-year-old Mary Parker Janoush is already anticipating.
"My teacher said we're going in a cave when we go there," she said.
"They're going to cut all the lights off, and you won't be able to see your hands," Devante cut in, recalling his trip there two years ago.
Every spring, when it comes time to take the Mississippi Curriculum Test, Hayes Cooper students consistently score among the top five in the state. This fall, the school received a superior Level 5 rating, one of only four in that category in the Delta, including Greenwood's Bankston Elementary.
If the Greenwood Advisory Group on Economics pursues its idea to form a charter school in Greenwood, it would do well to pick up some tips from Hayes Cooper, which is part of the Cleveland School District.
The citizens group is exploring the charter-school concept as a way to reunite a Greenwood school system that they say is a detriment to the economic health of the community and the future of its children. A charter, based on a five-year contract between the school and the state Department of Education, allows a school to operate free of the policies and procedures regular schools have to follow.
But emulating Hayes Cooper might not be that simple.
It was formed as a magnet school in 1991, the result of a communitywide committee's study on how to satisfy a federal desegregation order for the Cleveland School District. "We got together a group of teachers black and white, a group of administrators black and white and a group of parents black and white, and that's how Hayes Cooper came to be, out of that committee," Reese said.
They named the new school after a beloved custodian who served the district many years.
The school's faculty and administration have always been open to new ideas, Reese said, and the Cleveland School District has always backed them. They take retreats together and have regular brainstorming sessions. Ideas such as covering the state benchmarks in science at the Earth Lab come "out of our own little twisted minds mostly," Reese said.
"We've always prided ourselves on being cutting edge," she explained. "If it's something we feel will benefit our children, we're going to step out into that territory, so the faculty was 100 percent for it. And the district administration is always behind us."
Starting as a magnet school gave Hayes Cooper its math-science-technology focus. Joining the Whole School Initiative added an artistic bent to the curriculum.
But finding the time and resources to make the real-world connections that happen at Hayes Cooper wouldn't be quite so easy if it weren't a charter school, according to teachers and administrators there.
As a charter school, the only one in Mississippi, Hayes Cooper allows its teachers to step outside the standard curriculum and into their imaginations, said Elizabeth Belenchia, an algebra teacher in her 13th year at the school.
"As classroom teachers, we have a lot more flexibility in what we do and how we do it," she said. "We cover the basic guidelines, but we broaden the curriculum."
One year, Belenchia's geometry class measured the proportions of the entire school and divided it into the ratios of the different parts - the buildings, the cafeteria, the playground, even the greenhouse.
The parent participation at Hayes Cooper is out of hand.
At a schoolwide dramatic presentation of "The Night Before Christmas," cars were lined up so far along Old U.S. 49 that a highway patrolman came knocking. That's a good problem to have, Reese said.
"We just kind of grinned at him, and he said, 'Well, maybe I'll just stand out here and direct traffic. How will that be?'" she recalled. "We had over 1,000 people in this building, and we took over the town of Merigold that night."
The school right now is trying to raise money to build a multi-purpose room because the cafeteria, which isn't a small space, can't hold all the parents who show up for events.
"Whenever we have PTA or orientation, we're just bursting at the seams," said Beverly Janoush, a fourth-grade math, science and history teacher.
The school's charter requires all parents to sign a contract pledging to participate in their children's education. Parents who break the contract jeopardize their children's place in the school.
So there's never a time during the school day when parents aren't in the building, according to Reese. Last week, a father was repairing the waterfall in the school's ornamental pond, which sustains an ecosystem of fish, snapping turtles and aquatic plants for the students to observe. Parents have painted the walls, paid for the playground and participated in reading circles with kids.
The students act up like elementary students do, but they know they have the same investment in their education as their parents, Janoush said. "They know we have a list in that office this long of kids waiting to take their place if they slip up," she said, spreading her arms far apart. "So they work hard to stay here."
A science class was outside Hayes Cooper last week searching for pretzels on the school grounds.
The exercise, said Debbie Fioranelli, the school's science specialist for grades 1-6, simulates how food supplies affect deer populations. The students who collect the target range of pretzels stay in the game, while those who bag too many or not enough have to sit with the rest of the dead deer.
"Everything doesn't have to be paper and pencil," Fioranelli said. "It becomes more meaningful when you get to act things out or participate in them."
Fioranelli was one of the original teachers at Hayes Cooper, who took over the then-vacant school building. They scrubbed everything down, repainted the walls and opened Hayes Cooper without computers, bookshelves or even textbooks to fill them.
"We literally walked in with what we personally had, and we started school," she said. "We took kids from seven different elementary schools and had one of the most marvelous school years of my career, and I've been teaching 25 years."
A lot has changed since that first year, and a lot is still changing as Fioranelli checks to make sure the waterfall in the ornamental pond is working.
She has planted an orchard of dwarf fruit trees, which will grow as tall as many of her students. She missed pumpkin season this year, but the ground has been cleared to grow some next year, along with peanuts, watermelons and gourds.
"We usually go to the pumpkin farm in Belzoni, but I want the kids to be able to see the pumpkins grow," she said.
Soon, Fioranelli's classes will begin composting the school's organic waste into fertilizer for the garden, the orchard and the wisteria lattice in the corner of the yard.
"It never ends," she said. "You just start thinking, and the ideas never stop."
